Facebook Crashes- World Follows Right Behind

Social media aficionados were stunned, shocked and aghast on Friday, August 1. No, it wasn’t a new rate hike or yet another revelation about the government spying on your innermost tweets. It was even worse.

Facebook went down. For TWENTY Minutes.

I know; that was it. In the cube-farm where I work, at around 12 noon Eastern, someone called out, “Hey, anyone having trouble with Facebook?” You could hear fingers flying over keyboards, and then a few other folks called back, “Yeah, seems to be down,” followed by a pregnant pause and then the office wise-ass (possibly this reporter; unconfirmed as of press time) yelled out, “You have time for Facebook? Don’t you have WORK to do?” That may or may not have been followed by a string of insults hurled at said reporter. And that was the extent of it in one office. The social media site came back online about 20 minutes later.

But the real story is more layered than that. Immediately following the outage, Facebook was mum as to the cause, and how widespread it was. But mainstream media jumped all over it, it being the middle of summer and there not being much other tech news to speak of.

The best report (depending on your definition of “best”) came out of Los Angeles, where a number of concerned residents actually called 9-1-1 to ask about the outage.

Seriously? 9-1-1??

It got so bad that one L.A. County Sheriff’s sergeant took to Twitter, posting this note: “#Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please don't call us about it being down, we don't know when FB will be back up!”

As expected, Twitter users were delighted, as they got to pillory Facebook via another form of social media that was still up and running. Sarcastic tweets seemed to rule the day, along the lines of “@facebook is down? OK NOTHING HAPPEN ANYWHERE”; “Facebook is down. I can already feel the muscles that let me press ‘Like’ when a cute cat photo is posted, begin to atrophy” and “Attention world: #facebookdown. Please remain calm and do not attempt to interact with human beings.”

But all this snark, panic and humor highlighted an even more important point: Just how much time are we all spending on Facebook every day, anyway? Yeah, we know Mark Zuckerberg and friends just came off a really strong quarter, posted record profits and are even richer than they were before. But if that news wasn’t enough to cheese us off, now we see that a lot of people are reading (and posting) updates, sharing photos and doing all sorts of things that aren’t even peripherally related to work. All during the workday.

Are you monitoring this usage in your office? If not, maybe it’s time to start doing so. Imagine having a program where you could track one employee’s entire computer usage over the course of a single day. Better yet, how about if you could monitor their smartphone usage as well?

Yes, I know, we’re getting dangerously close to “Big Brother” territory here. We’d like to think that everyone comes in and works their full day, giving the company 100 percent, 100 percent of the time. But as social commentator and comedian George Carlin so succinctly said a few years back, “You know, executives don’t write memos at 9:01.”

If nothing else, this little blip on Facebook’s radar let a lot of people know that a lot more people are on Facebook (and presumably other social media) than anyone realized. And that should be a concern for every manager trying to make budget numbers and productivity quotas.

For every stupid video that’s posted and shared, that’s one less piece of work getting done on time. Multiply that by the number of people who commented on the Facebook outage, and then multiply that by a factor of about 1,000 or more of people who noticed but didn’t say anything, and you’ve got a pretty big number. It might help explain why America keeps coming up short every time they post a survey of national economies and productivity. It seems we might be too busy browsing and reposting memes to actually do what we’re paid to do.

And suddenly, a light bulb brightens over the head of IT managers everywhere. This isn’t the end of this issue; it’s probably just the beginning.

About the Author

Rory J. Thompson has been writing about technology since the time when you had to use a “Mo-Dem” (Makes a Dr. Evil-like “air-quote” gesture with his fingers) to get online, and the Internet with its bells & whistles was something only seen on the TV show Star Trek. He was Senior News Editor at the PRODIGY online service back in the mid 1980s, and then subsequently worked in various senior editorial capacities at major national technology publications including Informationweek, Baseline and Smart Partner. Currently a Web Editor at TMCnet.com, he still finds time to take a slightly jaded look at the world of technology today, and wants someone to come up with cellphone ringtone that sounds like a modem connecting to a phone line, complete with static and crackles.

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